Hi Everyone, 

A boat called Sainte Luce pulled up next to us last week, three kids and their parents. We'd met them for the first time six months ago in Antigua, they were the first cruising family in the Caribbean who we'd met from the UK. Since then, we've discovered that this family is easily the most adventurous family we've met so far on this voyage. They've been everywhere and a lot of the time twice. We hear from them every once in a while. They plug in and write us an email, telling where they've been and where they're going and they always ask us if we want to come too. 'Well, we didn't cross the Atlantic like you you did. We bought our boat here,' they take turns saying as if this explains everything. Ok, but a lot of us who have sailed across an ocean don't go anywhere once we get here. Anchored into the sand, attached onto mooring buoys or stuck to the end of a pontoon, Grenada is full of these boats. And I smile ruefully when I say it but after meeting this adventurous family again last week, I think it's time to include Quest on this list. 

Is this a bad thing? I've always thought that cruising with children creates its own conditions. Not quite bed at eight-thirty but with an element of compromise. Kids like routine, right? We’re all told it when we leave hospital along with our newborns, a car seat, a hospital wristband and fear in our eyes. The thing is, when I was a kid I can't ever remember liking routine. At no point do I remember thinking, God, I love my eight-thirty bedtime. Most of my best memories revolve around the things that weren't the norm, the staying-up late, the roller skating in the dark, showering in thunderstorms. Perhaps I'm confusing routine with stability. Who knows. For sure, kids like stability when it comes to their loved ones and their security. When we left Wales, we left with a kid who said not long before we left that she has 'dance in her heart.' We were driving to dance class and she was looking out the window at a technicolor Welsh green field and she said it, without looking at me, that if you took away dance, then her heart could well stop. With dead seriousness. I smiled at the time but here we are over a year later, a dancing Quest, sailing round the Caribbean looking for dance schools. Well, what's a parent to do? Make her heart stop? Still, this doesn't lend itself to a copious amount of movement in our mix. We are just not the adventuring family who pulled up their anchor to leave just two days after they'd arrived and about twelve hours after our kids had established themselves as firm friends. Nice kids too. I want to go too, I heard myself thinking while they were retreating into the horizon. Like a little popping bubble.

Love from Quest and her crew xx